DANCE

DANCE; Ailey's Bright Star Leads the Troupe Into a New Era

By JENNIFER DUNNING

Published: December 2, 1990

Judith Jamison has come home. As a young dancer barely out of her teens, she first came to the attention of Alvin Ailey when she literally tripped over him as she rushed blindly out of a failed audition. Over the next 15 years, she became an Ailey star -- and a star who fit few of the stereotypes of a dancer. Now she sits behind the studded brass desk that Ailey occupied as founder and director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Last December, only weeks after his death, the longtime colleague and friend whom Ailey once affectionately described as "the tall, gangly girl with no hair," was named artistic head of the company that he founded in 1958. On Wednesday, the company begins a four-week engagement at the City Center Theater, its first season under Ms. Jamison's direction.

"People ask me, 'What's different? What are the changes you've made?' " Ms. Jamison (pronounced JAM-ih-son) said in a recent interview at the new Ailey headquarters on West 61st Street, just west of Lincoln Center. "It's an evolving situation. I want to sustain this company and not have it be a museum piece. I want to challenge the dancers and the audiences with as much diversity as possible." She talks of Ailey's conviction that "what he had to say should be accessible, and available to all."

Yet she is not Ailey, though there are poignant echoes of him in her speech and mannerisms, from an explosive laugh to an only gradually perceptible reticence. Ms. Jamison speaks forthrightly, with the glow of someone who came relatively late to a sense of her own style and beauty as a powerfully built black woman who, at just under 6 feet, towers above most other dancers. There has been no diminution of the radiance that made her so distinctive in her years performing with the Ailey company, though the vein of impudent humor that ran through her dancing has become more ironic as she has moved into the administrative side of dance.

For now, Ms. Jamison is taking it all, in her words, "a day at a time and two years in advance." But is it hard being a woman -- and a black woman, at that -- running a major American dance company, with 28 performers and an annual budget of $7 million?

"Look at me," she said cheerfully. "Come on. There is an advantage to looking like this. And if I have a sense there is a problem, I tackle it immediately and get it right out of the way. Nip it in the bud. I've learned that it saves a lot of wear and tear on your system and on others if you do. Stay vulnerable, but wear your armor.

"I am particularly blessed. My father was a sheet-metal worker. He also worked with wood. He taught me to play the piano. He had marvelous hands -- rough but with long, beautiful fingers. And I've always had that complement of opposites. I have never lost sight of that because I came from a family that obviously didn't lose sight. You just don't turn around and let life get you down. I've gotten here."

Last year, the Ailey troupe experienced a severe financial crisis, but that has been eased by recent grants of $300,000 and $500,000, respectively, from the Ford Foundation and Philip Morris. Members of the company have been discussing Ailey residencies with several cities around the country, modeled on its popular and successful residency program, which includes a camp for needy children, in Kansas City, Mo.

Those looking for revelations of the Jam ison touch in the roster of new ballets for the season will be disappointed. Two company premieres were created for Ms. Jamison's own troupe, which, founded in 1988, has merged with the Ailey troupe -- her "Forgotten Time," set to music by the female singing group Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, and "Read Matthew 11:28," a first dance by Kris World, a member of the project, set to music by Bobby McFerrin. Two Ailey works -- "Hermit Songs" and "Hidden Rites" -- will be revived.

The Ailey dancers will also perform Donald McKayle's bitterwsweet "Games," a 1951 piece about children's street-corner play; Pearl Primus's "Impinyuza," a paean to the royal dancers of the Watusi of Ruanda, and Lar Lubovitch's "North Star." The dances to be performed have little in common. That eclecticism and range are very much in the Ailey tradition that spawned Ms. Jamison, a member of the troupe from 1965 to '80.

It was Ailey who discovered and nurtured her as a performer and who suggested that she create her first dance, "Divining," in 1984. Ms. Jamison was also one of the dancers Ailey relied upon to help him run the company. His interest in her as a successor, Ms. Jamison said, was "an ongoing secret." In one of their last conversations before his death, they discussed her directorship, almost unnecessarily. "That was one of the beautiful things about Alvin," she said. "He didn't have to say much. What was unsaid was sometimes clearer than what was said."

In "Judith Jamison, Aspects of a Dancer," a 1982 biography by Olga Maynard, Ms. Jamison said of her relationship with her mentor: "Alvin and I have this love-hate thing, a relationship that I think we both appreciate, if neither of us truly understands it." Sometimes, she added, it seemed the relationship of twins.

"Sometimes we could read each other's minds. That did not always make for a frank and happy relationship, if one of us disapproved of something the other one was doing -- or not doing, as the case might be. I guess what I am trying to say is that there was a strong empathy between me and Alvin, and I've always believed that if only I had been a man, I would have been Alvin's best friend."

One of Ms. Jamison's aims has been to draw all members of the company into the administrative process. Another has been to make sure that the Ailey dancers do not perform as if they "live for the stage."

"But there's something deeper than just self-gratification, something that has to do with recognizing that performing is a shared experience."